October 14, 2007

Fitchifying the History of Linguistics

A few days ago Mark applauded
the publication in Nature of several articles on linguistics,
including one by W. Tecumseh Fitch, `An invisible hand' (a News and
Views essay surveying the other two articles, which are
quantitative studies of lexical change). Mark's right, of course,
that it's good to see linguistics featured so prominently in such a
prominent journal. But as far as Fitch's article is concerned,
linguistics might have been better served by non-publication.

Fitch's view of the history of linguistics is distorted, and so is
his understanding of language change. There are other oddities in
his article -- his Just-So-Story explanation of the slide into
pejoration of some English terms for women (hussy, wench,
etc.), for instance -- but the main problems are historical. The
misunderstandings are worth discussing because they aren't confined
to Fitch, and because the real stories are instructive. Addressing
the two topics will take some space, so I'll divide the discussions
into two posts, starting here with the history of linguistics.

Taking August Schleicher and Jacob Grimm as his prime examples of
19th-century historical linguists, Fitch presents the intellectual transition from historical to synchronic linguistics this way:

Unfortunately, many historical linguists entertained quasi-mystical
ideas: August Schleicher...believed that languages are living things,
and Jacob Grimm posited a Sprachgeist -- an internal spirit of
a language driving it to change along certain lines.
Twentieth-century linguists rejected such fanciful notions, and
emphasized the capacity of individuals to produce and understand
utterances. Noam Chomsky famously characterized this as a conceptual
shift from a historical preoccupation with `E-language' (a set of
externalized utterances) to an emphasis on `I-language' (principles
internalized by the language learner).

That is, according to Fitch, historical linguistics failed because
its main practitioners had nutty ideas, so that it had to be replaced
by the truly scientific linguistics of Noam Chomsky and his
followers. What actually happened is more like this: modern
synchronic linguistics got its start early in the 20th century and
developed steadily for the next 50+ years, becoming increasingly more
widely practiced (and more fashionable), until the publication of
Chomsky's Syntactic Structures in 1957 launched the meteoric
rise to fame and glory of generative grammar. Historical linguistics
certainly stopped being the main game in town, even before 1957; but
as a field it's still going strong, building on a very solid
late-19th-century foundation. It is one of the most successful
historical sciences you'll find anywhere.

Both Schleicher and Grimm were major contributors to the
development of 19th-century historical linguistics, and their
occasional flights of fancy are far outweighed by their substantive
contributions. But -- and here's where Fitch's account begins to go off the rails -- both of them made their contributions before the great breakthrough that still ranks
as one of the major achievements in the entire history of
linguistics, and for that matter in historical science, period: the
Neogrammarians' formulation of the regularity hypothesis of sound
change, which led directly to the development of the Comparative
Method, through which "genetic" relationships among languages (via
descent with modification from a single ancestral language) are
established and sizable chunks of long-vanished parent languages are
reconstructed. Schleicher and Grimm were not Neogrammarians; the
achievements of the Neogrammarians were not fanciful; and those
achievements were neither replaced nor superseded by synchronic
linguistics. Fitch might have realized this if he had not imagined
that `[t]he crowning achievement of these early linguists [read:
historical linguists] was a family tree of languages'. Schleicher is
famous for his family tree, but it was the Neogrammarians, not
Schleicher, who turned historical linguistics into a historical
science by developing a rigorous and spectacularly successful set of
methodological principles. And in any case, it was not intellectual
flaws in late-19th-century historical linguistics that led to the
rise of synchronic linguistics.

The actual story is more interesting. Ferdinand de Saussure is
often, and with justice, called the father of structural linguistics:
it was Saussure's early 20th-century work that inspired the emergence
of a new synchronic science of language. His central idea (quoting
from Wikipedia)
was that `language may be analyzed as a formal system...apart from
the messy dialects of real-time production and comprehension'. In
other words, Saussure emphasized the importance of system --
structure -- in the study of synchronic language states. But long
before he founded structural linguistics (and foreshadowed the
distinction between E-language and I-language), Saussure was an
Indo-Europeanist. He began his studies in Leipzig in 1876, the very
place and year of the Neogrammarian manifesto, as expressed by the
great Slavist August Leskien:

Die Lautgesetze kennen keine Ausnahmen!

(in English: Sound laws know no exceptions!)

In 1879, still a student, Saussure published his famous
Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les
langues indo-européennes (Thesis on the primitive system of
vowels in the Indo-European languages). This is the initial
proposal of the theory that later came to be known as Laryngeal
Theory. The significance of Saussure's proposal (formulated when
he was all of about 20 years old!) is hardly confined to
Indo-European (IE) linguistics. It was in fact the first major
structural analysis of a language in Western linguistics -- the
language, in this case, being Proto-Indo-European, the reconstructed
ancestor of the many IE languages. Saussure took the extraordinarily
messy and numerous patterns of IE vowel alternations, the so-called
ablaut alternations, and reconstructed a much neater and simpler
system for PIE by hypothesizing the existence of three consonants
that had not survived into any of the then-known IE languages,
ancient or modern. He could not have done this if he had not started
with a profoundly structural notion of the language system; and the
structural notion itself, though it was developed in a dramatic way
by Saussure, was prefigured by the Neogrammarian breakthrough, the
regularity hypothesis of sound change -- which also makes sense only
if language is viewed as inherently systematic.

Saussure's Laryngeal Theory at first met with considerable
skepticism from historical linguists. His approach was novel, to put
it mildly, and the idea of reconstructing unknown, unattested
consonants did not appeal to traditionalists. Acceptance came slowly
over the next fifty years or so, aided especially by the decipherment of
Hittite, which turned out to have retained some of the consonants
that Saussure had reconstructed solely on structural grounds. The
triumph of Laryngeal Theory also owed much to the fact that it turned
out to be fruitful, permitting the explanation of alternations in
morphemes and paradigms that had been wholly mysterious under
pre-Laryngeal Theory reconstructions of PIE vowels.

The moral: Far from representing a sharp break with a misguided
and inferior past, as Fitch would have it, the rise of synchronic
linguistics was an outgrowth of the achievements of the
late-19th-century Neogrammarians. Saussure learned Neogrammarian
principles as a student at Leipzig; he applied the Neogrammarian
structural concept to an essentially synchronic analysis of Proto-Indo-European structure;
and thereafter he continued to develop his structural ideas until, in
the last decade of his life, he earned his status as the father of
structural linguistics.